log home was built with Leopold pine.
Nina and I entered the shack. In a corner
sat the canvas chair Aldo had made. Above
the window hung Carl's toasting-fork spear
(he used it to pluck carp from the flooded
fields and plant them among the potatoes). I
noticed deep cuts in the cedar log that Luna
had emplaced as a mantel. In 1939 boys van
dalized the shack, taking an ax to the man
tel, puncturing pots and smashing plates.
They poured kerosene in Estella's tins of
homemade blackberry jam and wild honey.
They stole Aldo's tools, and reduced his li
quor supply.
"When we came in," Nina said, "all of us
just went to a corner and began to cry. All,
that is, but Dad. He just looked around, saw
our state, and burst into a big smile. 'I didn't
know how much this place meant to you,' he
said. 'Let's get busy.' At night we would end
up around the fireplace with guitars, sing
ing. But Dad always went to bed early. We
would ask what he wanted to hear. He
would raise his head and say 'How about
Brahms's "Lullaby"?'"
Getting up too early is a vice habitualin
hornedowls, stars, geese, andfreight trains.
Some hunters acquire it from geese, and
some coffee pots from hunters. It is strange
that of all the multitude of creatures who
must rise in the morning at some time, only
these few should have discovered the most
pleasant and least useful time for doing it.
Aldo Leopold was up well in advance of
the birds. Around 3:30 or 4 a.m. the door of
the shack would swing open, and Aldo
would step out, a cup in his shirt, coffeepot
in one hand, tiny notebook in the other. He
would sit on the bench, have a sip, and lis
ten. He also carried a light meter, and with
each call would jot down bird, time, and
footcandle: Song Sparrow, 4:32, -0.012.
One hundredand twenty acres, according
to the County Clerk, is the extent of my
worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a
sleepy fellow . .. at daybreak I am the sole
owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is
not only the boundaries that disappear,but
also the thought of being bounded.
Leopold believed that the future of
American wildlife lay largely on private
land, in the attitudes and decisions-wise or
otherwise- of American farmers, not in the
tape of bureaucracy. "At what point," he
Aldo Leopold: "A Durable Scale of Values"
asked,
"will governmental conservation,
like the mastodon, become handicapped by
its own dimensions?"
He likened his fellow conservationists to
his bird dog Gus, who, when he couldn't
find pheasants, pointed meadowlarks.
This whipped-up zeal for unsatisfactory
substitutes masked hisfailuretofind the real
thing.... We conservationists are like
that.... we have found us a meadow
lark ..
. the idea that if the private land
owner won't practice conservation, let's
build a bureau to do it for him.
Leopold had always been somewhat of a
loner, and he paid a price. At wildlife confer
ences, in articles, by force of his intellect,
Aldo Leopold commanded the stage, but
some in the wings were chilled in his shad
ow. He was not one of the boys.
In the 1940s Leopold saw that Wiscon
sin's irrupting deer herd was destroying the
forests. Leopold was a member of the Con
servation Commission. Trim the entire
herd, not just bucks, he argued, or we will
lose the deer and the woods for decades to
come. He was called a Bambi killer.
"He wasn't naive," Starker told me, "but
he believed in an honest, straightforward
presentation of the facts and debate. He was
not a subtle politician. He became increas
ingly discouraged by the inability of the pub
lic to accept facts and by their propensity to
get emotional."
Aldo's family saw a change come over
him. At the shack he was still full of enthusi
asm, but in Madison he withdrew more into
troubled thought. He developed tic doulou
reux, a painful inflammation of the facial
nerves that eventually required surgery at
the Mayo Clinic. Sleep became more diffi
cult, and he rose even earlier. Dawn would
find him at his walnut desk at the office, well
into another essay.
N EXAMS, Leopold wrote: "Please
boil down your writing; it will be
graded for conciseness of expression."
A student's paper on deer browse stated:
"The scope of this paper has been pur
posely limited to woody species common
to the bear-oak type as it seemed desire
able to lay particular emphasis upon the
winter season when woody species were not
only heavily
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